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Alleged German Atrocities 



ENGLAND'S MOST 
EFFECTIVE WEAPON 



By 
JOHANNES MATTERN 



Reprinted from "The Open Court" of December, 1915 



CHICAGO LONDON 

The Open Court Publishing Company 



1915 






ALLEGED GERMAN ATROCITIES. 

ENGLAND'S MOST EFFECTIVE WEAPON. 

BY J. MATTERN. 

Motto : War was declared not only against German 
soldiers and sailors, but against German repu- 
tations. — The New Statesman, London, May 29, 
1915, p. 176. 

THE world has been deluged with stories of alleged German 
atrocities and with made-to-order evidence of German barbar- 
ism and frightfulness. We all know the official reports of the 
Belgian, French and British "atrocity" commissions, we know 
Bedier's German Crimes from German Evidence, we know Percy 
Bullen's The Hun's Diary, we know J. H. Morgan's A Dishonored 
Army, and many more of like order. But in spite of the generous 
advertising which all these have received in the magazines and the 
daily press favorable to the Allies' cause, they seem to have utterly 
failed in their mission, at least with those neutrals who do a little 
thinking of their own. The mode of presentation of all of them 
is too ostentatious, their manner of , representation too crude and 
perverse to gain confidence and command belief with people who, 
in these troublous times when hysteria seems to be rampant, have 
preserved at least a grain of common sense, sound judgment and 
cool reasoning. These atrocity stories as they appeared in hundreds 
of gaudy, and sensational British and French anti-German war 
books, pamphlets and the like; these official reports distributed by 
the hundred thousand and reproduced in almost every political and 
popular journal, did for a time baffle and stir the heart of every 
neutral, no matter on which side his sympathies were ; but the pur- 
pose was too manifest and the effort through which the purpose 
was to be achieved too grotesque to convince others than those who 
wished to be convinced. Even in the United States, this hotbed 



ALLEGED GERMAN ATROCITIES. 731 

of pro-Allies sentiment, they are taken with a grain or more of salt 
by all except the editors of that section of the press which is more 
British than the British themselves. 

However it would be saying too much to state that these 
atrocity stories, whether of private or official manufacture, have 
entirely failed in their purpose. To be sure, they seem to be per- 
forming a valuable service in the countries where they originated, 
and the assumption seems well warranted that they were, in the 
last analysis, doctored up for home consumption. At least that 
is the view one gathers from G. E, Toulmin's revelation in the 
March number of the Journal of the Royal Economic Society. This 
is what he writes : 

"Statesmen [it is English statesmen of whom he speaks] know 
in their hearts that in order to brave a democracy to bear the ter- 
rible losses and sorrows even of triumphant warfare, a mob-instinct 
of horror and repellence must be cultivated and maintained. The 
word 'Germany' must always be used so as to stir up a complex of 
anger and disgust." 

Mr. Toulmin's admission is corroborated by the New Statesr^ 
man, London, May 29, 1915, which, with apparent disapproval, 
acknowledges that "War was declared not only against German 
soldiers and sailors, but against German reputations," and that 
"if the destruction of German reputations goes on much further 
we [the English, or the Allies, or the world] shall not be surprised 
to find the followers of the late Mr. Kensit denouncing Martin 
Luther as a Hun who was secretly in the pay of the Pope." 

A drastic example illustrating how these make-believe stories 
of German barbarism are made use of in England is found in E. J. 
Balsir Chatterton's Appeal to\the Nation which has as its object 
the winning of a million rrtek-ibers for his "Anti-German League." 
These are Mr. Chatterton's ''"appealing" words: 

"Never before in England's history has the nation been faced 
with problems so grave and complex. We stand, or rather shall 
shortly stand, at the parting of the ways. On the one hand lies a road 
to prosperity and Empire — a road we are opening at a sacrifice in 
blood and treasure, the like of which the world has never seen — 
on the other, the resumption of a policy of thrift and apathy, which 
would again permit the Teutonic leprosy to threaten our very ex- 
istence .... When offered goods bearing the mark of the beast, I 
ask you to think of the vast army of phantom dead, of the poor 
breastless women, of the outraged girls, of the little children torn 
to pieces, of our brave soldiers with their faces beaten to a pulp 



732 THE OPEN COURT. 

as they lay wounded, and of the sinking of the Falaba with over 
a hundred innocent passengers, amid the jeers of the fiends on the 
pirate submarine, and the Lusitania with hundreds of helpless vic- 
tims sacrificed to the bloodlust of the Butcher of Berlin. The 
time for false sentimentality has gone. It is quite useless fighting 
savages with silk gloves on. Let us get to business and destroy — 
destroy first of all the fabrics of their fast approaching commercial 
supremacy — ostracize them socially as a pestilent and cankerous 
growth — and, lastly, make it impossible for them, with all their 
knavish tricks and subtle devices, to ever enter our markets again 
in unfair competition." 

Thus Chatterton's Anti-German League of a "Million members 
who will preach the anti-German doctrine all over the country" 
must represent the German as a "beast," a "leper," a "savage," a 
"pestilent and cankerous growth," in order to deter the English 
from trading with him, while Mr. Toulmin propounds the theory 
that all trade relations must be and are being broken with the 
enemy in order that he may effectively be represented as the "bar- 
barian and traitor," the "plague spot" and what not else. For if 
trade relations of some kind or other should continue, "the word 
'German' would be redolent," so Toulmin concedes, "not of hatred 
but of profitable contracts" ; "the reaction caused by the word 
'Germany' would be lessened, and a valuable stimulus to self- 
sacrifice and, in a volunteer country, to recruiting would be lost." 

I have just come across an English pamphlet entitled The 
Truth About German Atrocities, and issued by the "Parliamentary 
Recruiting Committee." Was it this pamphlet that inspired Mr. 
Toulmin's article in the Journal of the Royal Economic Society"^ 
or was it Mr. Toulmin's article that inspired the Parliamentary 
Recruiting Committee to issue this pamphlet? 

For Chatterton the atrocity bugbear is the means of killing 
German trade and competition ; according to Toulmin trade relations 
with the Germans must be interrupted so that the English, against 
their own better knowledge, may be duped into believing the hor- 
rible accusations lodged against their enemy and, fortified by holy 
indignation, bear the otherwise unbearable burden of the war, or, 
what in sober thought would and could not be expected of them, 
flock to the colors to fight for a cause which they fail to recognize 
as their own. On the one point however the two, Chatterton and 
Toulmin, agree: atrocity stories are a prerequisite without which 
the English government cannot succeed in its management of the 
war. 



ALLEGED GERMAN ATROCITIES. 733 

The neutral world, including the United States, with the ex- 
ception noted above, sees the point and accepts these reports, 
private and official, of alleged German "outrages, crimes, atrocities, 
and the like" for what they are worth — "an essential part of the 
war game." However, most of our esteemed British cousins do 
not realize such discomforting facts as yet. They are still busily 
engaged in manufacturing new "war material of this sort" and 
still more frantically at work making use of this kind of ammu- 
nition, the only kind, by the way, that they seem to be able to 
produce in sufficient quantities and of effective quality. 

Every English or French steamer arriving at New York still 
brings thousands of copies of anti-German war books, all more or 
less reveling in vivid and perverse descriptions of improbable or im- 
possible crimes laid at the door of the "Huns" or "Vandals." 
Hardly an issue of a magazine or paper appears without a "spicy" 
review or an excerpt from the "choicest" scenes. Most of these 
atrocity stories are so disingenuous, so cunning in their insinuations, 
so exaggerated in their coloring of the subject, so clearly designed 
to appeal to the baser instincts of their prospective readers, in short 
so revolting to the sense of fairness to be found even in the most 
biased "anti-German neutral" that they positively defeat their own 
ends. They need no answer, they answer themselves. In this class 
belong, in addition to those already mentioned, such books as The 
Last of the Huns, by G. Saunders ; Lest We Forget. An Anthology 
of War Verses, edited by H. B. Elliott ; In Gentlest Germany, by 
Hun Svedend, translated from the Svengalese by E. V. Lucas, a 
miserable parody on Sven Hedin's With the German Armies in the 
West; German Atrocities, by W. Le Queux ; La Grande Barharie, 
by Pierre Loti ; The World in the Crucible, by Sir Gilbert Parker ; 
and many, many more. 

Still, occasionally one meets with a spontaneous outburst of a 
natural, and therefore honorable, indignation springing from an un- 
warranted, but nevertheless real, belief in what the Germans are 
charged with. This is the kind of criticism — the only kind that 
deserves and demands an answer — to which Charles T. Gorham's 
article in The Open Court of September last belongs. When I here 
mention Mr. Gorham I do so speaking of him as a type, and it is 
in that sense that I shall refer to him in the following. I have 
stated that I consider Mr. Gorham's indignation natural and honor- 
able, and his belief in the causes for his indignation unwarranted but 
real. Indeed so childlike seems to be his faith in the Bryce report, 
that any attempt to shatter his confidence assumes the aspect of an 



734 THE OPEN COURT. 

atrocity of the blackest type. With admirable earnestness he claims 
that "according to the investigations which have been made [by 
the Bryce Commission] the charges brought against the Belgians 
are false, the charges against the Germans are true." But how 
does the Bryce report prove the charges agamst the Germans and 
disprove the charges against the Belgians? By testimony taken 
under oath ? No ! "The depositions"- — so we read in the introduc- 
tion to the report — "were in all cases taken down in this country 
[England] by gentlemen of legal knowledge and experience, though 
of course they had no authority to administer an oath." Are the 
names of the unsworn witnesses given ? No ! "Many hesitated to 
speak" — so the excuse runs — "lest what they said, if it should ever 
be published, might involve their friends or relatives at home in 
danger, and it was found necessary to give an absolute promise 
that names should not be disclosed." This excuse appears in a 
rather peculiar light when we consider that most of the witnesses 
examined by the Belgian and French Commissions did not manifest 
such tender considerations for their relatives, nor even for them- 
selves. 

Thus the Bryce report cannot, as far as its evidence is con- 
cerned, even be compared with the reports of the Belgian and 
French commissions, of which the latter at least claims to be 
founded "chiefly on photographs and on a mass of evidence received 
in judicial form, with the sanction of an oath." 

But even of these Belgian and French reports a reputable and 
distinguished countryman of Mr. Gorham, the English labor leader 
Ramsay Macdonald, wrote as follows : "The use that is being made 
of the words 'cruelties' and 'atrocities' is in my opinion to be con- 
demned severely. In the first place the so-called documentary 
proofs of the Belgian and French commissions are no proofs at all. 
It is absolutely impossible to state accurately what takes place, 
when one is in the midst of terrible experiences with nerves strung 
to the highest pitch and the ability to observe carefully and clearly 
utterly destroyed. A dreadful death becomes a cruelty, and imagi- 
nation takes the place of observation. I know that, if I myself had 
undergone what some of these poor people must have suffered, my 
report of the facts would be neither trustworthy nor objective. It 
would only describe how the horrors had affected my mind. In 
addition to this we have had so many cases in which apparently 
indisputable proof was produced, that nevertheless were pure in- 
vention or received another and quite satisfactory explanation, that 
even the seemingly most trustworthy statements are not always to 



ALLEGED GERMAN ATROCITIES. 735 

be accepted. It is astonishing that legal authorities, Belgian and 
French — and later even English — have set their names to these 
reports of cruelties, — reports made under conditions under which 
even the best judge would give up all pretence of being able to give 
a clear presentation of the facts, That cruelties, brutalities and 
atrocities have occurred is self-evident; that the German army is 
responsible for the greater part of these is likewise a matter of 
course, for the obvious reason that the localities were for it an 
enemy's country. But to use these things, which are inseparably 
connected with war and which have been reported of every army 
operating in the field, as a means of stirring up hate between the 
nations and of prolonging the conflict, is abominably devilish and 
must be condemned by every right-thinking man." According to 
the War Chronicle for February last this letter appeared in the 
VoLv de I'humanite published in Lausanne, and it appeared in 
English, not in French, because Macdonald's views "are decidedly 
opposed to the point of view of most of its [the Voix de I'humanite' s] 
collaborators, and in order to avoid any mistake in their interpre- 
tation." 

The same adverse criticism applies, of course, to the Bryce 
report, and, for reasons enumerated above, to a much greater degree. 
Yet on the strength of this report Mr. Gorham makes the amazingly 
naive and sweeping statement that "the charges brought against the 
Belgians are false, the charges against the Germans are true." 

What are the charges brought against the Belgians? I quote 
from the German White Book on the Belgian People's War: 

"Immediately after the outbreak of the war in Belgium a savage 
fight was started by the Belgian civilians against the German troops, 
a fight which was a flagrant violation of international law and had 
the gravest consequences for Belgium and her people." 

The chief incidents of this "savage fight by the Belgian civilians 
against the German troops" took place at Aerschot, Andenne, Dinant 
and Louvain. About eighty depositions by German oflicers and men, 
every one sworn before a military court the names of whose mem- 
bers, moreover, are given for every case, prove beyond the possi- 
bility of doubt that the German charges against the Belgians are 
justified. In spite of this I shall not, and need not, ask Mr. Gor- 
ham, or anybody else, to accept even such sworn proof, coming as it 
does from the German side. I shall instead offer the testimony of 
an American, Lieutenant-Colonel Edwin Emerson. His testimony 
was given voluntarily during an illustrated lecture arranged under 
the auspices of the German-American Trade Association of Berlin. 



736 THE OPEN COURT. . 

Colonel Emerson, being on leave of absence, felt free to express 
his opinion without restraint, and in the presence of the American 
ambassador, the consul-general and the larger part of the American 
colony made the following statement: 

"Inhabitants of Louvain admitted to me themselves that their 
firing at the Germans had been a terrible mistake. They would not 
have done it, they told me, had they not been secretly informed 
from Antwerp that a sortie from that city had been successful, and 
that the Germans were in full retreat on Louvain. When then a 
small column of tired-out German soldiers happened to enter Lou- 
vain that same evening, the deluded populace thought that they were 
part of the completely routed and fleeing troops of the German 
army, and at once opened fire upon them. I would here, as a mili- 
tary man, further say that, if I were in war and a hostile civilian 
population were to fire on my troops, I should proceed in the same 
way as the Germans did in Louvain. Our American soldiers always 
did the same in the Philippines. As a literary man I naturally 
regret that the historically valuable library in Louvain happened 
to be burned, with other buildings, but in war, fire and sword are 
always at work, and regrettable losses of valuable things take place 
in all belligerent countries. I was in Vera Cruz this last spring 
when our American marines completely destroyed the valuable li- 
brary of the Mexican Naval Academy. Our officers of course re- 
gretted this afterwards very much." (From D. A. W. War Tracts, 
No. 7.) 

But Colonel Emerson, because he spoke at the German capital 
and because he may be suspected of German leanings, may not prove 
convincing to some who were not present at his lecture. So I shall 
let E. Alexander Powell, war correspondent for the New York 
World J relate his experience on the same subject. This is what he 
witnessed and relates in his work. Fighting in Flanders, a book 
which is anything but a hymn to the Germans : 

"We started early in the morning [Powell and Van Hee, the 
American vice-consul at Ghent, to take dinner with General von 
Boehn] . . . . And though nothing was said about a photographer, 
I took with me Donald Thompson. Before we passed the city 
limits of Ghent, things began to happen. Entering a street which 
leads through a district inhabited by the working classes, we sud- 
denly found our way barred by a mob of several thousand excited 
Flemings. Above the sea of threatening arms and brandished sticks 
and angry faces rose the figures of two German soldiers, with 
carbines slung across their backs [not directed at the mob], mounted 



' ■ ALLEGED GERMAN ATROCITIES. 7Z7 

on horses which Jthey had evidently hastily unharnessed from a 
wagon. Like their unfortunate comrades of the motor-car episode, 
they too had strayed into the city by mistake. As we approached, 
the crowd made a concerted rush for them. A blast from my siren 
opened a lane for us, however, and I drove the car alongside the 
terrified Germans. 'Quick!' shouted Van Hee in German. 'Off 
your horses and into the car ! Hide your rifles ! Take off your 
helmets ! Sit on the floor and keep out of sight !' The mob, seeing 
its prey escaping, surged about us with a roar. For a moment 
things looked very ugly. Van Hee jumped on the seat. T am the 
American consul !' he shouted. 'These men are under my protec- 
tion! You are civilians [!] attacking German soldiers in uniform. 
If they are harmed your city will be burned about your ears.' At 
that moment a burly Belgian shouldered his way through the crowd 
and, leaping on the running-board, levelled a revolver [I] at the 
Germans cowering in the tonneau. Quick as a thought Thompson 
knocked up the man's hand, and at the same instant I threw on the 
power. . . .It was a close call for every one concerned, but a much 
closer call for Ghent ; for had those German soldiers been murdered 
by civilians in the city streets no power on earth could have saved 
the city from German vengeance. General von Boehn told me so 
himself." (Chapter V, "With the Spiked Helmets," pp. 110-112.) 
Still more conclusive than Mr. Powell's anti-German contribu- 
tion is what I have the pleasure of offering in the following quota- 
tions from Belgian, yes Belgian, newspapers, in which the partici- 
pation of Belgian civilians in the fighting against German troops is 
heralded and praised as the highest form of duty and patriotism. 

Gazette de Charleroi, August 11, 1914: 

"The spirit of our revolutionary war is awakened in our dis- 
tricts. A wave of heroism animates our souls. On the roads one 
meets youths and grown men, some armed with old muskets, others 
with shotguns, many with revolvers." 

Het Handelshlad of Antwerp, August 6, 1914: 

"Like madmen and without mercy they fought, and a certain 
part of the population of the lowlands, whose peaceful labors on 
the fields are disturbed, was seized by a veritable fury to defend 
the soil of the fatherland against the treacherous Prussians .... 
From cellar windows, from holes made in the roofs by the removal 
of tiles, from private houses, from farm buildings and huts, a furi- 
ous fire was opened against the storming Uhlans and the Schleswig 
troops." 



738 THE OPEN COURT. 

ft ■ . 

Journal de Charleroi, August 10, 1914 (from the- report of a war 
correspondent) : , * 

"Returning from Brussels I came to Waterloo and there I 
found the entire population in arms; some had muskets, of one 
description or another ; others pistols, revolvers or simply sticks 
and pitchforks ; even the women were armed." 

De Nieuwe Gazet, August 8, 1914: 

"The civil population fires on the invaders :" 

"In Bernot the vanguard [of the Germans] became involved 
with the citizens, who, like madmen, shot at the invaders from the 
roofs and windows of their houses. Even women took part in the 
shooting. An eighteen-year-old girl with a revolver shot at an officer 
. . . .The peasants and inhabitants maintained a regular fire with 
the advancing Germans." 

In Bedier's German Crimes from German Evidence we find 
the following passage from the diary of an unnamed German sol- 
dier : 

"Thus we destroyed eight houses, with the inhabitants. From one 
house alone two men with their wives and an eighteen-year-old 
girl were bayonetted (erstochen). I took pity on the girl, her face 
appeared so innocent, but we could do nothing against the excited 
mob (Menge), for on such occasions (dann, i. e., under such con- 
ditions) men are not human beings but beasts." 

What, I ask, becomes of this passage, so convincing to Bedier, 
in the light of the preceding confessions of the Nieuwe Gaset? 

But to return to the subject, there are more such Belgian con- 
fessions. 

Journal de Charleroi, August 8, 1914: 

"The resistance offered to the enemy by our peasantry is proof 
of its patriotic feeling. The indignation at the invasion of Belgian 
territory, which has seized all hearts, has aroused our entire people 
and has united them with our troops .... Our peasants are ready 
for the greatest sacrifices." 

La Metropole, Antwerp, as late as October 7, 1914: 

"To arms ! Every able-bodied man take his gun [a gun, or the 
gun]. Do not serve the barbarians! Go at the enemy!" 

These quotations from Belgian newspapers are taken from 
Richard Grasshoff's Belgiens Schuld. Zugleich eine Antwort an 
Professor Waxweiler, Berlin, Georg Reimer, 1915. They are, as 



ALLEGED GERMAN ATROCITIES. 739 

Grasshoff states, only a few of the many in his possession, but these 
few speak loud enough, these few indeed suffice to invalidate all the 
Belgian and French and English official reports to the contrary. 

And having seen the Belgian civil population convicted by the 
testimony of Emerson, Powell and their own newspapers of all 
that the German White Book has charged them with, we shall con- 
sider what Mr. Gorham ventures to say on the same subject. Thus 
he writes : 

"Before the entry of the Germans into Belgium, orders had 
been given in every town, village and district of that country that 
all arms were to be delivered up to the authorities. The evidence 
shows that these orders were faithfully complied with.... In any 
case the fact of the official order to deliver up arms and the com- 
pliance therewith show that no forcible resistance by non-combatants 
was sanctioned or contemplated. The evidence proves that none 
took place." 

Here I rest my case. Let the reader be the judge. I am ready 
to accept the verdict. 

The next logical step then would be to admit that the punish- 
ment meted out to the "maddened Belgian civilians shooting from 
houses, from roofs, from cellar windows," a punishment which I 
concede was a terrible one, was retributive and not provocative. 
Hence Mr. Gorham's accusation that "the German troops left their 
own country provided with the means for the deliberate commission 
of cruel outrages" should be amended to read : "The German troops 
left their own country provided with the means for the deliberate 
commission of relentless retribution for unlawful attacks by the 
civil population of any of the enemy countries." Those ingenious 
stories that "drunken" or "mischievous" German soldiers had fired 
the same shots that were laid at the door of innocent Belgian civil- 
ians, on the one hand rest on what unnamed and unsworn refugees 
express as their belief, not their knowledge, and on the other hand 
are refuted by the sworn testimony of German officers and men 
whose name and rank are given and who are all in complete agree- 
ment as to the details of the occasions on which such shooting is 
supposed to have occurred. 

However Mr. Gorham is of the opinion that, even if Belgian 
civilians had done all the Germans accuse them of having done, "a 
generous foe would have dealt leniently with them" and "certainly 
he would not have avenged himself upon innocent children." Since 
particulars of this alleged vengeance practised upon innocent chil- 
dren are not furnished by Mr. Gorham we have to search for such 



740 THE OPEN COURT. 

elsewhere. Document a ?i2) of the Bryce report relates the following: 

"Two of the [German] privates held the baby, and the officer 
took out his sword and cut the baby's head off. . . ." 

The Belgian refugee relating this supposed incident in the 
course of his examination, and referring to the shooting of the 
mayor of Cornesse in whose village a German soldier had been 
wounded by civilians, expressed himself in the following manner : 

"They found him and placed him against a wall in the court- 
yard of the school, and four or five German soldiers shot him. 
He was only hit in the legs, and a German officer came up and shot 
him through the heart with a revolver. He was an old man and 
quite deaf. I do not know what his name was. I never heard 
whether it was true that the German soldier had been shot by an 
inhabitant of Cornesse ; some said it was true and some said it was 
not. Some people even said the soldier had shot himself so as 
not to be obliged to fight any more." — "Some said — and some said 
not" ! This is the quality of the testimony upon which the Bryce 
report is based, and on the strength of such pseudo-testimony — 
commonly called gossip — the world is asked to believe that three 
German soldiers, one of them an officer, are capable of murdering 
an "innocent baby." 

On this kind of testimony the London New Statesman of Jan- 
uary 30, 1915, makes some pertinent remarks which deserve to be 
reproduced in this connection. The New Statesman says : 

"What puzzles one in the whole business is the way in which 
evidence in support of things which have not happened [that is, 
stories of German atrocities] is invented among perfectly honest 
people. It is partly, we think, because the majority even of honest 
people do not hesitate to modify the nature of the evidence as they 
pass it on. One man passes something on to a friend as a piece of 
hearsay ; the second relates it as something which a friend of his 
actually witnessed ; the next man to hear the story makes it still 
more dramatic by declaring that he saw the thing himself. And 
even the third of these men may be, comparatively speaking, hon- 
est. He is frequently one of those persons subject to hallucinations, 
who believe they have been present at what they merely heard 
about, just as George IV firmly believed that he had fought at the 
battle of Waterloo." 

Referring to the stories of Belgian children being mutilated 
by the Germans the New Statesman in the same issue has this to 
say: 

"It is the same with the myth of the Belgian mutilations. It 



ALLEGED GERMAN ATROCITIES. 741 

was impossible to meet any one who did not know somebody — or 
at the very least who did not know somebody who knew somebody 
— who had seen the child with his or her own eyes. Every suburb 
of London, every town, every village, almost every vicarage, had 
its Belgian child sails hands, sans feet. One knew people who 
knew people who could vouch for it on the very best authority. 
The mutilated children had been sent in trainloads to Paris and in 
boatloads to England. To doubt a man's Belgian child soon became 
as serious a matter as to doubt his God .... Now the real sufferings 
of Belgium it would be almost impossible to exaggerate, and the 
story of those sufTerings is an infinitely longer and more horrible 
story than the most longwinded or Sadistic version of the mutilated 
Belgian child. But . apparently the public had to get into its mind 
some drastic representation of all that horror, some representation 
which would be an easy and stimulating substitute for the prolonged 
study of hundreds of thousands of scattered facts. The Belgian 
child gave the public what it wanted — one of those favorite symbols 
in war-time when men like to picture themselves as the knights of 
God, fighting against devils more atrocious than the Devil." Thus 
the New Statesman, more effectively than a thousand sworn denials 
could have done, disposes of the myth of the "Belgian child sans 
hands and sans feet." Likewise, it disposes just as effectfully of 
the baby-killing related in document a 33 ; of the incident quoted 
by Mr. Gorham, where "a child of two years .... while standing 
in the street of Malines, was transfixed by a brave German soldier 
with his bayonet and carried off on the weapon, a song on the lips 
of its murderer" ; of the case found on page 57 of Le Queux's 
German Atrocities, where it is alleged that "the lancer took up his 
lance and ran it through one of the little girls who was walking 
along, clutching the hand of her mother. She was a fair-haired 
girl of about seven or eight years of age" ; in short, it disposes of 
all of them. 

But there is one other kind of accusation in Mr. Gorham's 
arraignment of the German conduct in Belgium, and that is one 
which I would prefer not to touch, were it not that silence might 
be construed as admission. "What can you say" — Mr. Gorham 
asks — "of the public violation of fifteen women in the square of 
Liege, in the presence of and begun by officers? You will, I trust, 
disapprove of the appalling savagery deposed to by witnesses a 33, 
c? 118, rf 133, and above all, c?86. These incidents are so horrible 
that it must have needed some resolution to print the accounts ; 
but there are hundreds of others nearly as bad!" I volunteer to 



742 THE OPEN COURT. 

add that a still greater resolution is required to read them, pro- 
vided of course that the imagination of the reader is not already 
"tuned up" to such a pitch of sensualism by the reading of Emile 
Zola's or, worse yet, the Marquis de Sade's works. I shall further 
add that it was accusations of this kind, and the manner of their 
presentation, that I referred to as perverse and revolting. That 
there are in an army of millions — be they Germans, Russians, 
French, or even the purest of the Puritan English — some whose 
animal instinct is stronger than discipline, self-control and respect 
for the sex that brought them into this life and has given or is to 
give life to their own children, no one but a hypocrite will deny. 
But that things should or could have happened as they are related 
in documents a 33, d W^, d 133 and d 86 is impossible to believe, 
especially on the basis of such flimsy testimony as furnished in 
these documents. That the severest penalty is meted out to any 
soldier or officer who so far forgets himself as to violate or to 
attempt to violate a woman, is well known and need not be re- 
asserted here. That the threatened punishment is being and has 
been meted out to culprits is equally certain. 

Mr. Powell in his Fighting in Flanders, Chapter V, p. 126, 
attributes to General von Boehn the statement that "of course, our 
soldiers, like soldiers in all armies, sometimes get out of hand and 
do things which we would never tolerate if we knew it," and that 
"at Louvain, for example, I sentenced two soldiers to twelve years' 
penal servitude each for assaulting a woman." 

Another case of this kind is cited in one of the diaries, alleged 
to have been found on German dead and prisoners and published 
by Bedier. The diary in question is that supposed to be written 
by private Z (more of his name is not given). "Unfortunately" — 
so the passage reads — "I am obliged to mention something which 
should never have happened. . . .Last night a man of the Landwehr, 
a man of thirty-five, and a married man, attempted to violate the 
daughter of a man in whose house he had been quartered; she was 
a child ; and as the father tried to interfere he kept the point of his 
bayonet on the man's breast." Here ends Bedier's French trans- 
lation, but the photographic reproduction of the supposed original 
writing of private Z continues thus: "Is such a thing possible? 
But he [the German soldier] is awaiting his due punishment." 
Why did Bedier suppress these two sentences ? Because they defeat 
any attempt to lay these sins at the door of the German authorities. 

For the benefit of Mr. Gorham and his kin I refer to Robert 
J. Thompson's book, England and Germany in the War. Mr. 



ALLEGED GERMAN ATROCITIES. 743 

Thompson was American consul at Aix-la-Chapelle when the war 
broke out. "Because of the [United States state] department's 
instruction to make neither investigations nor reports on the serious 
— and at that time acute — subject of miHtary reprisals" — so he 
writes in the introduction to his book — "I have withheld all of my 
observations and reports until my resignation would give me free- 
dom to speak fully and in direct accordance with the facts." In 
the chapter on "Atrocities on the Field and in the Press" he records 
the "nurse-with-her-breast-cut-off-by-German-soldiers" story which 
originated in Edinboro, and he reminds his readers that the "girl 
who concocted it has since been convicted by the courts of that 
good town." Mr. Thompson is of the opinion that "the sentence 
should have included a goodly number of London editors and Amer- 
ican correspondents," and he regrets that "unfortunately for the 
peace of mind of the world, the court fell short of convicting, for 
libel, the perpetrators of the alleged crime, but rendered judgment 
because of the grief the girl had caused the parents of the mis- 
treated nurse who, strange enough, was her own sister." 

Of late, various efforts have been made to accentuate the 
alleged barbarous methods of the present-day Germans by holding 
them up in contrast with the more human methods of their fathers 
in the Franco-Prussian war. In one of these attempts the writer, 
one Courtney Kenny, expresses himself as follows : 

"The atrocities committed by the Kaiser's troops in Belgium, 
which are awakening the indignation of the world, afford a start- 
ling contrast to the conduct of the fathers of those troops during 
the invasion of France in 1870. In your issue of October 17 [The 
Spectator] you cite from Sir Thomas Fraser a testimony that the 
French peasants of 1870 could give their German invaders the 
credit of 'respecting the women, and doing what was wanted in 
the way of help.' In more than one invaded part of France I used 
to hear ladies give similar testimony as to 1870, conceding that their 
invaders behaved far better than French troops would have done 
if they had captured German towns. But a more striking testimony 
fell into my hands by accident recently when I came upon the 
address which Max Miiller delivered before the Germans of Lon- 
don at their festival of peace on the conclusion of the war with 
France (May 1, 1871). He says in the course of it: Tn no war 
has there been so little unnecessary cruelty ; in no war has every 
crime been punished so severely: in no war has humanity achieved 
such triumphs. We are prouder of these triumphs than of all the 
triumphs of our arms.'" (The Spectator, November 14, 1914.) 



744 THE OPEN COURT. 

And still, even in 1870-71 the fathers of the present-day "bar- 
barians" fared no better at the hands of some of their critics. I 
have before me a book, The Crime of War, by His Excellency, 
John Baptist Alberdi .... sometime minister plenipotentiary of the 
Argentine Confederation to the the courts of Great Britain, France 
and Spain. From the introduction we learn that the book was 
written in 1870 and from the title page, that it was printed in 1913 
at London and Toronto, by J. M. Dent & Sons. As far as its con- 
tents are concerned it might have been written last month, and its 
author might have been one of our present-day English writers, be 
it our friend, H. G. Wells, one of the Chestertons, Gilbert Parker, 
or some other. In proof of my assertions I submit the following 
quotations : 

"It is in the least civilized part of the world that Germany's 
example in the present war of 1870 will bring about as many evils 
as in France, by the sanction it gives, in the name of civilization, 
to the barbarism with which war is waged by less civilized coun- 
tries" (p. 283). 

"Prussia, for example, may gain much in this war which she 
is waging in 1870; but all her territorial conquests will never be 
of sufficient value to compensate for what she loses in the opinion 
of the civilized world, for her acts of incendiarism, and the requi- 
sitions, and the firing at and bombardment of inoffensive towns" 
(pp. 304-305). 

"The announcement which the King [in 1870] made in his 
proclamation inaugurating the war, declaring that he was waging 
warfare on the army, not on citizens, was taken as a humanitarian 
favor done to the latter; but, in its application, quite the contrary 
has happened, since the citizen has been treated worse than the 
soldier. The military man has been treated as a public enemy, but 
the citizen as a common criminal, because he performed his patriotic 
duties of a Frenchman, in a twofold character of franc-tireur and 
citizen, by defending his country; it matters not in what garb or 
clothing. To make of the Frenchman's patriotism — which is a 
virtue — a Common crime, is the height of the immorality with which 
a great country can tarnish its military policy" (pp. 305-306). 

Here we have an analogy to the case of Germany's alleged 
unwarranted cruelties against the "innocent Belgian civilians" who, 
as some say, did not shoot at all, or as other will have it, if they 
shot, were right in doing so. Substitute Belgium for France, Bel- 
gian for Frenchman, and the analogy becomes an identity. And ac- 
cepting His Excellency's indictment of the Germans of the Franco- 



ALLEGED GERMAN ATROCITIES. 745 

Prussian war at the same value at which Mr. Gorham accepts the 
Bryce report, or bringing both down to the same level on which 
all these private and official atrocity stories must appear in the 
light of the foregoing argument, one is in fact utterly at a loss to 
decide whether the "Huns" of 1914-15 are actually any worse than 
their more humane fathers of 1870-71, or whether the latter were 
actually in any way better than their much maligned epigones of 
to-day. I must let the reader wrestle with this momentous question 
and leave him to find the answer for himself. 

Closing my "humble" attempt to show things as they are and 
other things as they are not, I quote an oracle attributed to Anatole 
France. Quoth he: 

"The Germans have robbed the profession of arms of every 
vestige of humanity. They murdered peace, now they are murder- 
ing war. They have made of it a monstrosity too evil to survive." 

To this I add, in form of comment, a single prayer: May they 
succeed in murdering — or as I would express it — in abolishing war ! 
If they do, mankind will hail and bless them for all the ages to 
come. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




